“You look pale. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Carver said. “Just wondering what it is we’re about to open. Please, go on.”

Brigid read the whole chant that had been written onto the knife, drawing from her incredible memory to interpret the ancient symbols as best she could.

Beware! I am the bringer of Death, the Destroyer of Souls, the alpha and the omega, the vanishing point. Mourn now the end of your life’s journey, for all shall fall before my power, their family line expunged from all histories, their bodies returned to Tiamat. I am the blade Godkiller. Gaze upon my bloodwork and lament.

“This is the symbol for Enlil,” she explained as Kane and Grant returned to the discussion at the display cabinet, “but it’s been altered.”

“Altered how?” Kane asked.

Brigid pointed to the knife’s hilt before looking up at Kane and Grant. There was clear concern in her emerald eyes. “It’s the name of the knife’s owner,” she explained. “I think it means Son of Enlil.”

Infinity Breach

Outlanders®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Headlong themselves they threw

Down from the verge of Heaven, eternal wrath

Burnt after them to the bottomless pit.

—Paradise Lost

John Milton 1608–1674

The Road to Outlands—
From Secret Government Files to the Future

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.

After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 1

October 31, 1930

Somewhere in the South Pacific

Hiding amid the foliage, a beautiful woman peered through a set of compact binoculars in the direction the U.S. naval base. Demy Octavo was a tall, shapely figure, sheathed in a formfitting outfit of soft brown leather that clung to her every enticing curve like poured mercury. Matching leather gloves on her hands accentuated her long, elegant fingers, and a pair of matching handguns were strapped to the swell of her hips. The compact pistols were modified versions of the Beretta Model 1915, and their silver handles were engraved with the columnlike symbol of the Fascist party along with the motto Viva La Morte, or Long Live Sacrifice. Octavo’s tight-fitting ensemble left only her head uncovered, but for the moment her striking features remained hidden behind the binoculars.

Octavo’s skin was tanned to a wonderful bronze shade from hours spent reclining on the beautiful golden beaches of the Mediterranean, and she had carefully painted her lips a luscious, rich color known as falu red. Her long, dark hair swung freely behind her, cascading over her delicate shoulders like a waterfall, loose strands catching now and then on the island breeze. Her hair was a shade of brown so dark as to be almost black, and her tresses held a slight kink that was pleasing to the eye.

Demy Octavo was on a mission, sent to the South Pacific by her government under the auspices of Benito Mussolini himself, tasked to acquire important American military secrets. And yet, hidden in the natural cover of the island’s green-and-yellow ferns, the gorgeous Signorina Octavo did not watch the naval base. Instead, she had turned her binoculars to the skies above, where a single-seater airplane cut through the air, its engine buzzing like an angry hornet. The airplane was an experimental model, one not yet in general production. Sleek lines swooped back from the aircraft’s pointed nose cone, where an intake unit sucked in a stream of air to hurry its passage through the cloudless blue skies above the rolling waves of the Pacific Ocean. A glass blister protruded midway along the sharpened length of the dartlike aircraft, like a bubble on a stream, and a figure could be seen sitting within, piloting the strange vehicle with grim determination.

Demy Octavo knew that plane and she knew the figure who guided it through the azure sky. The pilot’s name was Abraham Flag, a gifted scholar and full-time adventurer who had done more for the American government in the past five years than any other man.

Tales of Abraham Flag’s exploits were splashed across the front page of every newspaper in America with alarming regularity, but those stories could only scratch the surface of Flag’s true contribution to the well-being and sanctity of the Land of the Free. However, Flag himself was no government employee. He worked for an even more noble cause, one he had described in his few rare interviews to the gentlemen of the press as “the continuance and evolution of mankind.”

The beautiful Signorina Octavo had clashed with Flag on several occasions in the past when her goals had conflicted with his own. They had met on the moonlit streets of Paris, Octavo armed with only a stiletto blade hidden in her stocking top beneath a cerise evening gown, and Flag armed with nothing but his keen intellect as they vied for possession of a meteorite of breathtaking mineral worth. They had become close then, as they found themselves in the romantic City of Lights, but, when he had realized the wicked government that Octavo represented, Flag had resisted the woman’s abundant charms. Instead, Professor Flag’s determined spirit had remained focused solely on preventing the invaluable meteor from falling into the wrong hands.

Even now, as Demy Octavo tracked Flag’s plane with her binoculars, she recalled those tender moments in Paris, before Flag had discovered the nature of her real mission. He had left with the meteor, and she had been forced to report her absolute failure to Mussolini. A man not renowned for his even temper, Mussolini had erupted with rage at the news.

Octavo watched the remarkable plane as it swooped around in a long, banking curve, almost as though its extraordinary pilot was taking one last, long look of the tiny Pacific island before deciding to land. Octavo knew that was not the case—Italian intelligence operatives had learned of the discovery in question three days ago when they had intercepted an urgent message that had been wired to Flag’s New York apartment, requesting his assistance as swiftly as possible. Flag himself had been out of the country at the time, working in his fabled Laboratory of the Incredible, where he was not to be disturbed, and so two of his frequent colleagues had gone in his stead. It had been two full days before Flag himself had responded to the U.S. Navy’s summons to confirm this appointment with mystery, a further day for him to reach the island from his laboratory in the Antarctic. Octavo smiled wickedly at the thought—Flag’s other commitment had given her time to charter a mail plane via New Zealand, which had brought her close enough to the tiny island to drop in the waters and swim ashore, unseen by the patrolling military.

The island itself was barely more than a pinprick on the map, a little-known territory of the United States of America called Isle Terandoa. Less than a decade before, the whole structure had been below the water, but a shift in the tectonic plates had revealed the atoll, and the U.S. had been quick to organize a small naval presence there. Tucked away between New Zealand and the western coast of South America, Terandoa had been used as a test site for the Navy, a place where they could try out prototype seagoing vessels well away from public scrutiny. More recently, the tiny island, which was no more than four miles square, had played grudging host to a team of archaeologists whose tedious excavation work had been seen as a dangerous compromise to security by the local Navy commander, a proud man called Edmond Kinver. Against Kinver’s requests, the brass in Washington had insisted that a small team from Harvard be given access to Terandoa, and so he had curtly accepted them, fencing off each area that they studied and hurrying them along in their painstaking work. That was, at least, until the head of the archaeological team, a man called Ross Moorcroft, had made an unexpected discovery. Moorcroft had brought his discovery to the attention of General Kinver, and soon after the call had gone out for Abraham Flag’s expertise.

The steady drone of the airplane’s engine grew louder to Octavo’s ears as Flag brought the sleek one-man craft in to land on the single airstrip inside the naval compound. The powerful lenses of Demy Octavo’s binoculars followed the aircraft’s descent and landing, and she waited patiently to see what would happen next. Five seconds passed, then ten, until finally that strange glass bubble that rested atop the arrow-shaped craft sprang open, flipping to one side on a hinged arrangement until it hung at the starboard side of the aircraft. A moment later, the pilot’s hand emerged and the powerful form of the mighty man of adventure vaulted from the cockpit, his booted feet gliding down the short run of steps that had been molded into the side of his unique aircraft.

As Flag’s toe struck the black tarmac of the landing strip, General Kinver, who stood to attention, offered the fabled adventurer a brisk salute. Two dozen sailors wearing smart dress uniforms stood to attention behind their general in the blazing midday sun, and from the end of the baking runway two men in civilian dress watched the proceedings. The first of these men had bright red hair and his shoulders were so wide that he reminded one of a football player still wearing his shoulder pads. The wide man’s name was Barnaby B. Barnaby, and he was an archaeologist of some renown. Beside Barnaby stood a much shorter man who wore an ill-fitting suit with a dark, sombre tie and a fedora hat. The man’s name was Anthony Pontfract, though he was known to his friends as “Little Ant.” Little Ant was a master linguist who was able to speak and read several dozen languages fluently and instinctively apply that knowledge to numerous others. Both men had a long history of accompanying Flag on his endeavors, and their companionship dated back to a period in the Great War when all three men had been incarcerated in a notorious prisoner of war camp.

Crouched amid the foliage almost one thousand yards away, Demy Octavo, the glamorous Italian secret agent, was unable to discern the words that were spoken. Thus, she simply watched in silence as Kinver exchanged pleasantries with Flag, patting him on the shoulder like an old friend as the smartly dressed squadron of his best men stood rigidly to attention at the side of the airstrip. Barnaby and Little Ant made their way along the airstrip to meet their friend, with Little Ant hurrying along to keep up with Barnaby’s distance-humbling strides.

It had been just a few months since Octavo’s most recent encounter with Abraham Flag, but the adventurer’s appearance still surprised her, making her heart flutter for just a moment like that of a giddy schoolgirl. Flag was an immense man, over six feet in height, with wide shoulders, muscular arms and sturdy legs. As such, the first impression he gave was not one of size so much as of exceptional power. Demy Octavo had been witness to several of Flag’s superhuman feats, and she knew that it was more than simply an impression of power that this singular man exuded. He wore his dark hair close to his skull, swept back from his high, intelligent forehead in the tidy style he had favored since his military days during the Great War. His eyes were a piercing purplish-blue, like two magnificent amethysts set beneath his unlined brow. He wore a casual shirt beneath a flight jacket of brown leather, similar in color to Octavo’s own outfit. His shirt, like his pants, was a shade of deep blue, complementing and exaggerating the color of his fascinating, unearthly eyes.

Flag and his two associates strode alongside General Kinver toward the main office building of the small naval base. Watching from afar, Demy Octavo was impressed in spite of herself to see Flag turn to the waiting sailors and salute them, taking a few moments to honor them for coming out to greet him in the roasting Pacific sunshine. Demy Octavo watched as Flag and his companions disappeared into the main building with the commander at their side.

Once the four men had disappeared from view, the beautiful, dark-haired Italian agent took the compact set of field glasses from her eyes, folding them in on themselves on a butterfly hinge mechanism before replacing them in the protective casing that she wore strapped to the small of her shapely back. Then, carefully scanning her surroundings for guards, Demy Octavo slowly pushed forward through the thick foliage, closing in on the mysterious objective that she and Abraham Flag shared.

ABRAHAM FLAG narrowed his eyes momentarily as he and General Kinver stepped out of the bright sunlight and into the relative darkness of the two-story administrative building, allowing his remarkable eyes to adjust and letting his other senses assess his new surroundings. Flag was a man unlike any other. His natural senses—smell, hearing, touch and taste, as well as his eyesight—were disciplined to an incredible level of prowess, and he relied upon those senses to sift through great swathes of information that the average man might easily ignore or miss altogether. Abraham Flag maintained the firm belief that every detail might hold a crucial warning, a pivotal fact that would yield its secrets if only one took the time to consider it fully. And unlike most men, Flag was able to consider those facts at lightning speed, such was his prodigious intellect.

“Where is the artifact?” Flag asked in a voice whose rich timbre both commanded authority and put its listeners at their ease.

Barnaby spoke up, his voice booming in the corridor as he led the way to a closed door. “The commander gave over an office just through here, Abe,” he explained as he pushed open the door. “We’ve spent the last two days trying to work out what this thing is made of.”

Flag stood stock-still in the doorway and looked across the room to the artifact. Resting on a work top, surrounded by Barnaby’s notes and a series of spectrographic photographs, was the artifact. It appeared to be a knife, its blade thin but stretching almost the length of a man’s forearm, like the itak machete used by the Filipinos for combat. The blade and hilt appeared to be of a piece, and as Flag stepped closer, he realized that they had been carved of stone. Its surface glistened under the lights of the room, like a polished volcanic stone, and Flag saw indentations all along its surface—writing. He glanced at the writing for a moment, instantly recognizing the ancient characters from a language that dated back several millennia. There appeared to be at least three dozen tiny characters etched into the blade’s surface, and Flag presumed that a similar number would be apparent were he to turn the weapon over.

Barnaby B. Barnaby spoke up as Flag looked at the weapon. “It’s at least three thousand years old, Professor. I’d estimate maybe five or six thousand years.”

Flag spoke without looking up from the object on the desk. “What does it say, Ant?”

Little Ant had already pulled a small notepad from his ill-fitting jacket’s breast pocket, thumbing through its dog-eared pages in anticipation of his ally’s question. “It’s ancient Mesopotamian, Chief,” the famed linguist explained. “There’s quite a lot of it, and there are characters here I don’t even understand, but the essence of it is a war chant, like a song. It says ‘Beware! I am the bringer of Death,’ et cetera.”

As Little Ant spoke, Abraham Flag reached into his own jacket and produced a pair of white cotton gloves of the thinnest of material, which he then placed over his hands. Wearing the gloves, Flag carefully lifted the stone knife and held it close to his gaze, running his eyes along the writing there. Working in silence, Flag flipped the knife over and scanned the characters along the other side of the blade before speaking once more.

“A war chant?” he repeated thoughtfully. “Did you find any indication to whom this chant was addressed, or who the owner of the knife might have been?”

“Nothing like that,” Little Ant admitted, “but I did find one name on it.”

“A name?” Flag encouraged, his purple-blue eyes flicking up to lock with the linguist’s.

“‘Godkiller,’” Ant read from his notes. “I think it’s the name of the knife itself.”

Chapter 2

Early twenty-third century

Antarctica

White on white. That’s what the Antarctic was. That’s all the Antarctic was.

Grant stood beside the cooling hull of his Manta craft, looking at the monotonous landscape that surrounded him. It was white as far as the eye could see, a freshly laundered sheet, stretching to the north, south, east and west. On closer scrutiny, Grant could make out that here was snow, there was ice and, billowing across it all, tossed about in the currents of the fierce winds, icy flakes of snow and snowy flecks of ice.

Snow and ice, white on white. Until this moment, Grant, who by any estimation was a well-traveled man, had never appreciated quite how many different gradations of white there could be.

Grant was a huge man, his skin like polished ebony, with black hair, close-cropped atop his scalp and shaped around his lips in a gunslinger’s mustache. Though he wore a puffy white jacket and pants, there was no disguising his powerful frame. There was a bulky lump on his right sleeve, the only evidence of the hidden sidearm Grant carried there.

As he turned back to the Manta, somehow relieved to see its obtrusive bronze form amid this white canvas, Grant pulled at the fur-lined hood of his jacket, raising it over his head. He didn’t feel cold, even out here in the arctic chill that was dipping to 40 below, but the wind was howling in his ears like a wolf howling at the moon. The shadow suit Grant wore beneath his jacket helped keep him warm. The shadow suit was a remarkable weave of advanced technology that provided a temperature-controlled environment for its wearer, along with protection against radiation and environmental toxins, as well as some protection from blunt trauma. Despite these incredible properties, the shadow suit was wafer thin, a one-piece bodysuit finished in black that could be easily slipped beneath other clothes. It was like wearing a suit of armor, but with none of the associated restriction of movement.

As the wind churned up the snow like a flight of doves, Grant stepped into the protective lee of the Manta craft and began to speak, seemingly to no one but himself.

“Kane?” he said. “I can’t see shit down here. Are you planning on landing anytime soon?”

Kane’s firm voice came to Grant’s ear a moment later, sounding so clear that he might be standing next to the man in a sheltered room far away from the blizzard’s howling winds. The communications were routed through Commtact units, top-of-the-line communication devices that had been found in Redoubt Yankee years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in the mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing. Theoretically, even a completely deaf wearer would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, using the Commtact.

As well as offering radio communications, the units could also be used as translation devices, providing a real-time interpretation of foreign language if sufficient vocabulary had been programmed into their data banks.

“Cool your jets,” Kane grumbled over the Commtact. “I’m bringing her in now.”

Before the final syllable of Kane’s proclamation had concluded, Grant saw the dark shadow appear overhead, dipping through the swirling snow, and a moment later the graceful shape of the Manta craft settled on the white blanket of snow beside him.

The Mantas were alien craft, left on Earth for millennia before being discovered by Grant and Kane during one of their exploratory missions. The beauty of their design was breathtaking, an effortless combination of every principle of aerodynamics wrapped up in a gleaming bronze finish. They had the shape and general configuration of seagoing manta rays, flattened wedges with graceful wings curving out from their bodies. The elongated hump in the center of the craft was the only evidence of a cockpit. The Mantas featured a wingspan of twenty yards, and a body length of almost fifteen feet. Finished in a bronze metallic hue, the surfaces of each craft were decorated with curious geometric designs; elaborate cuneiform markings, swirling glyphs and cup-and-spiral symbols that covered the entire body of the aircraft. The Mantas were propelled by two different types of engines—a ramjet and solid-fuel pulse detonation air spikes—allowing them flight in the skies and outside of the atmosphere.

Grant watched as the cockpit to the second Manta opened and two figures stepped out. Like him, both of them were dressed in white, wearing fur-lined jackets and white pants.

The first figure was a woman in her mid-twenties. She had vibrant red hair that trailed down her back like a burst of evening sunlight. Even as she stepped from the graceful wing of the Manta, the woman was bunching her hair back behind her head, pulling it away from her face as the Arctic wind blew it about her face. After a moment, she tied her hair back and looked up at Grant with her warm, friendly smile, her emerald eyes glinting with a furious intellect. Brigid Baptiste had been a crucial part of their triumvirate ever since Grant had joined the operation known as Cerberus. While her high forehead pointed to an intellectual aspect, her full lips suggested a more playful, passionate side; in truth, Brigid Baptiste was both of these and more besides.

Behind the attractive figure of Brigid Baptiste, the third member of the field team exited the Manta’s cockpit, even as the snow started to settle on its sloping bronze wings. This was Kane, Grant’s longtime partner, whose friendship was unquestioned, whose loyalty was unswerving. Grant had known Kane ever since their days in Cobaltville where they had been initially partnered as Magistrates, the strong-arm force that kept the citizenry in check. Whereas Grant was powerfully built and bulky, Kane was tall and lean with most of his bulk in his upper body. It had been said that Kane’s physique was like a wolf’s, and often his temperament was similarly inclined. He was pack leader, loner and scout. Like Grant, a bulky lump showed beneath the wrist of Kane’s jacket where he held his sidearm for quick access.

“Seen anything interesting?” Kane asked as he greeted Grant.

“Snow,” Grant grumbled, his deep voice sounding like a rumbling volcano.

Kane looked around before turning back to Grant with a self-deprecating grin. “Kind of samey, isn’t it?”

Grant nodded, his own mouth breaking into a grin.

“Monotonous,” Brigid corrected them both without looking up from the portable radar device she was consulting in her gloved hand, “is the word you are looking for. ‘Samey’? Honestly, who taught you two to speak?”

Kane glanced over Brigid’s head and caught Grant’s eye as the redheaded woman began walking away from the two Mantas. “You know, you’d never believe she used to be a librarian,” he said flippantly.

“That so?” Grant replied. “You’d think she’d let us forget once in a while.”

“Ha.” Kane laughed. “She never lets anyone forget anything, isn’t that right, Baptiste?”

Glancing up from the tracking device, Brigid fixed Kane with a disparaging glare before turning back to the readout screen she held in the palm of one hand. Although meant in jest, Kane’s observation touched on a crucial aspect of Brigid’s personality. The woman had what was colloquially known as a photographic memory, or, more accurately, an eidetic one. Brigid could study any image for just a few moments and commit it to memory in vivid detail, with the ability to draw from that memory again and again with total recall.

In her previous career as an archivist in Cobaltville, Brigid’s incredible powers of observation had put her in a critical position during the discovery of a worldwide conspiracy intended to subjugate humankind. Her subsequent work with Kane and Grant at the Cerberus redoubt had been primarily concerned with uncovering and overthrowing that conspiracy in all its many evolving forms. Even now, the presence of the Cerberus trio in the harsh environment of the Antarctic was tangentially related to that far-reaching scheme.

Their boots sank into the thick snow as the three figures trekked away from their Manta craft. Kane glanced back, watching for a moment as the swirling whiteness settled on the still Mantas. The two craft were already dappled with a thin coating of snow, and would doubtless be hard to spot in another hour or so. It struck Kane then that anything could be hidden out here—anything at all—and they might never see it.

Kane dismissed the thought. “Everyone remember where we parked, okay?” he instructed, his tone light. “Baptiste, I’m counting on you here.”

Brigid cast Kane another withering look as she continued to lead the way across the Antarctic wastes. “You think you’re funny,” she said. “Emphasis on ‘think.’”

“Lighten up,” Kane said as he brushed snow from his sleeves. “I’m just trying to keep things cheerful.”

“Oh, you’re very trying,” Brigid snapped. “I’ve had to listen to this blather for the full three-hour trip over here.”

“Really?” Grant asked, unable to hide the note of pity from his tone.

“The first hour was okay,” Brigid assured him. “The second I started wishing we’d found a parallax point so we could jump here instantaneously instead of using the Mantas.” Parallax points formed a hidden network of nodes stretching across the globe and out into other planets that allowed the Cerberus warriors to jump via the quantum ether through use of an alien device called an interphaser. The system allowed for almost instantaneous travel across vast distances, but it relied on specific locations; no parallax point, no interphaser jump.

“What about the third hour?” Kane grumbled.

“Wish I was dead, wish I was dead, wish I was dead,” Brigid muttered, the words streaming into one.

Grant looked at Kane and shrugged. “I think she’s joking, buddy.”

“Because she thinks she’s funny,” Kane said.

“Oh, touché.” Grant chuckled, applauding.

They had walked just eighty yards across the snowbound wastes when Brigid Baptiste stopped in her tracks and pointed ahead. “It’s right there,” she said.

“Where?” Kane asked, shielding his eyes with a gloved hand.

“I don’t see anything, either,” Grant added, scowling.

Peering in the direction that Brigid was indicating, they saw a continuing expanse of whiteness. Out here, the sky was white, a thick blanket of clouds reflecting the ice and snow below them. Snow flurries continued to fall across their vision, a dappling of white across the whiteness of the background. Kane relaxed his eyes, surveying the wash of white that stretched before him. As he did so, he noticed the shadow. It seemed almost incongruous as it stretched across the snow, pouring out across the white blanket in a gray, indistinct pattern that was easy to miss. The sun was ahead of them, Kane noted, pushing the shadow of the structure toward them so that its apex almost touched their booted feet. They had landed the Mantas barely one hundred yards from it, and yet it had remained utterly invisible, disguised in the harsh, white landscape.

Kane raised his arm, drawing its shape in the air with an outstretched finger. “There,” he said. “You see it?”

Grant squinted, trying to cut down the dazzling effect of the sun on the white snow as he sought the thing that Kane could see. Beside him, Brigid checked the readout of her palm-sized tracker device before peering again into the swirling whiteness.

A sudden lull in the wind brought with it a break in the dance of the falling snowflakes, and for a few seconds the majestic structure stood revealed.

It was white, like the ground and sky around it, so white that it seemed to exist only in the shadows it cast. Its leading edge stood just twenty-five yards from the three Cerberus warriors, and it stretched far back into the snow-packed ground. It was difficult to estimate its actual size, for it was clear that the structure had been mostly buried by the snow. Yet the evidence of it was there, a rough circle of struts and spines that dominated the land for almost a quarter mile, becoming more crowded near to what was presumably the center.

There were other parts, too, they now realized as they gazed all around them. Struts stuck up here and there, like shoots from a hopeful plant. Kane looked behind him at the path they had just trod. Their footprints were already losing their shape as the swirling snow filled them in, and in another few minutes they would be gone completely as nature painted over them, obliterating any trace that they had ever existed. And over there, just a few feet from where they had walked but a minute before, another strut poked from the ground, rising up in a point that towered to twelve feet above them, twice the height of himself or Grant. As remarkable as it seemed, they had walked right past it, taking it for a natural feature of the snow-laden environment, a stalagmite striving up to the skies. Kane’s eyes flicked upward, and he smiled as he saw that there was nothing above the strut, nothing to drip down and create the beautiful stalagmite that twinkled in the frosty sunlight.

Brigid released the breath she hadn’t realized that she had been holding. “It’s colossal,” she gasped.

“See,” Kane said, “I’d have gone for big and maybe samey.”

“It’s so beautiful,” Brigid continued, ignoring Kane’s remark.

Still shielding his eyes, Grant stepped closer to Brigid, peeking at the display screen of the tracking device she held. “You think this is it, then?”

“Oh, this is it, all right,” Brigid assured him, never turning her attention from the magnificent spires that jutted from the white landscape. “The secret laboratory of Abraham Flag.”

Chapter 3

The wind picked up again, and snow swirled around them as they stood there, admiring what little they could see of the fantastical structure. After a few seconds, Kane turned to Brigid, who still stood with her mouth agape as she admired the magnificent spires of the buried building.

“I think we’d better find a way inside, Baptiste,” he told her, “before my, er, frozen assets fall off.”

“What?” She turned to him, mystified. “Sorry, Kane, I was just…”

“It is beautiful,” Kane agreed. “But let’s not wait to see what it looks like inside. That’s why we came here, isn’t it?”

Brigid nodded. “It is going to be very exciting seeing what’s inside there,” she said as she jogged forward, leading the way. “I can feel it.”

Kane followed the red-haired woman, while Grant brought up the rear, as she compared the electronic readout she held to the structure around her. Brigid’s instrument held a portable sonar device, as well as a computer memory containing the plans that they had found for Flag’s so-called Laboratory of the Incredible. The plans had been discovered among other sensitive information that had been held as encrypted files on a computer drive that Kane, Brigid and Grant had found on a mission in North Dakota a few months previously. The computer had contained a wealth of military information dating back over two hundred years to the final days of the twentieth century, before the nukecaust of 2001 had changed everything. Decrypting the files was proving to be a laborious process, teasing out the information one tiny thread at a time. The first useful file to be decrypted from the North Dakota hard drive had contained information relating to a secret weapons project near the Russian-Georgian border. The weapon, code named the Death Cry, promised to be of devastating use against a race of alien invaders called the Annunaki, who had been manipulating the human race since their earliest days. However, a confluence of events upon finding the Death Cry had resulted in the device going off in a level of the quantum plane generally reserved for matter transfer, though thankfully not a plane that the Cerberus team accessed.

The scientists working at Cerberus had continued in their endeavors to decrypt further files from the database in the hopes of finding something else that might be of use against the Annunaki. Their latest discovery had been the incomplete schematics to a fabled research laboratory from the 1920s. The Laboratory of the Incredible had been the rumored workplace of Abraham Flag, an adventurer and explorer of some renown, whose exploits had abruptly halted on All Saints’ Day, 1931. A master of many scientific fields, Flag had been conducting research that was years—decades even—beyond that of his contemporaries. However, he had chosen to keep many of his remarkable discoveries to himself and, upon his disappearance, a persistent rumor had it that the man’s fortresslike laboratory contained numerous treasures, from nuclear reactors to a functioning cell phone that required no broadcasting network for its operability. The truth of these rumors had, to Brigid’s knowledge, never been proved, but clearly Flag’s hidden Antarctic retreat had been a matter of some concern to the U.S. military.

Guided by the information from the North Dakota data base, the Cerberus field team had traveled to the Antarctic and pinpointed the Laboratory of the Incredible as best they could. Only here, on the ground, was the enormity of the structure becoming apparent.

Kane, Grant and Brigid spent almost an hour searching the immediate area, looking for a point of entry into the strange construction, but other than the spires and bumps, there seemed to be nothing but deep snow.

“I think it got buried,” Brigid announced after they had spent a full twenty minutes just trekking around the perimeter of upthrust spires.

Kane looked at her, his brow furrowed.

In reply, Brigid shrugged. “It’s been here a long time,” she said. “The natural weather patterns cover everything with snow over time.” As she said it, she unconsciously shook her head, and settling snow fell from her ponytail of bright red hair.

“Guess we’re making our own entrance,” Kane decided, producing a compact tool kit from inside his Arctic jacket. The tool kit was roughly the length of Kane’s forearm, and it featured a weatherproof pouch of soft leather that snapped together so that it could be placed snugly into the inside pocket of his jacket. The kit contained several compact tools, including a lock pick, a glass cutter and a digital lock jammer.

As the wind and snow blew about them, Kane pulled out a handheld buzz saw and snapped together an acetylene torch from the leather pouch. Then he set about finding a place to start working, with Grant and Brigid dogging his footsteps.

As Kane selected a mound from which one of the curious icelike spires protruded, Grant turned to Brigid and asked why anyone would design a building that needed to be constantly dug out of the snow.

Brigid shrugged. “Maybe the owner preferred it that way,” she suggested. “Abraham Flag was, by all accounts, a fascinating and unique individual. He liked his privacy.”

“So Lakesh was saying back at the base,” Grant responded, recalling the briefing that the Cerberus team leader, Mohandas Lakesh Singh, had given them prior to dispatching the Manta craft. “But what’s the big deal about all this anyhow?”

“If that military record was correct,” Brigid explained, referring to the coded file they had found on the North Dakota computer, “there’s a strong possibility that Flag gained control of an ancient Annunaki artifact. It’s that artifact that caused him to go into hiding.”

“What sort of artifact?” Grant asked, brushing snow from his sleeve.

“A weapon,” Brigid said.

“What kind of weapon?” Grant asked. “A nuke?”

“Well, what kind of weapon does a god carry?” Brigid replied enigmatically.

“A lightning bolt,” Kane growled, not bothering to look up from his work at the mound, “if what we found Marduk using in Greece is anything to go by.”

“We’ll see,” Brigid said diplomatically.

Kane’s eyes met with hers and Grant’s for just a moment, and the hint of a smile crossed his lips. “I’m saying lightning bolt,” Kane said. “Anyone care to take a bet?”

“Kane…” Brigid began, her expression frosty.

“Giant hammer,” Grant cried, snapping his fingers. “I say it’s a great big hammer with a handle as tall as Brigid. A hammer that can…knock down mountains.”

Kane laughed. “Sure, that’s likely,” he said, an edge of sarcasm to his tone.

“You never heard of Thor?” Grant snapped back.

“Whatever.” Kane laughed. “I’ll take the bet.

“Baptiste?” he prompted.

Brigid shook her head, her ponytail of vibrant red hair whipping about her with the rising wind. “I can’t really…”

Brigid offered a resigned sigh. “Okay. I say it’s a…dagger.”

“A dagger?” Kane repeated dubiously, while Grant worked beside him, hefting the hunk of reinforced glass away. The hunk of glass was large, almost as tall as Grant himself and it clearly weighed a great deal. Yet Grant seemed to lift it with almost no effort, such was the man’s strength.

“A knife,” Brigid continued thoughtfully, “made of stone that features…”

“Features?” Kane encouraged.

“Writing,” Brigid finished. “A stone knife with writing down both sides that promises the death of godly enemies. Satisfied?”

Kane raised his eyebrows, impressed. “Pretty specific, Baptiste,” he said. And then, after a moment’s thought, he asked, “How much inside knowledge you got?”

“Me?” Brigid replied, offended.

“Come on, spill,” Kane insisted.

“If you’d bothered to read Lakesh’s notes, you’d have seen…” Brigid began.

“Notes?” Grant spit. “Did you see how thick that report was? The file was like the Prophesies of Whathisnamus.”

“Nostradamus,” Brigid corrected automatically.

As they spoke, Kane swept snow aside and pulled back a hunk of glistening metal from the ground. The edges were a little jagged, but it had the rudimentary appearance of a door into the snow. “Okay, kids,” he announced, “we’re in.”

Seconds later, Kane clipped a powerful xenon flashlight to his jacket’s lapel and clambered through the door, his two partners following him.

Making their way through the makeshift doorway, the three Cerberus exiles found themselves standing on a ledge about seven inches across. Leading the way, Kane walked along the ledge, kicking several small objects aside that appeared to be nothing more than paperweights.

Together, they made their way along the ledge until they could jump down to what appeared to be a series of steps running along the towering walls of a vast chamber. They found themselves in a high-ceilinged area that reminded Brigid of a chapel. Remarkably, Kane’s flashlight beam was redundant; the area appeared to be lit through some hidden process that granted the ceiling a soft, pleasant glow. The glow was more than enough to light the room, and it almost seemed to be natural light, rather than artificial.

The chamber stretched on for almost eighty feet, with a width of half that again. The high ceiling gave it the air of a cathedral, and Brigid found herself looking up in wonder at the enormity of the place. The ledge that they had initially dropped onto had led to a series of shelves that doubled as steps. The shelves stretched all the way up all four walls, with a few items placed sparsely along their lengths. Everything was the color of ice, white and blue and crystal clear.

As they peered all around them, the three explorers saw twin rows of glass cabinets spaced widely apart in two perfectly straight lines that led to the exit doorway. Each of the cabinets held a mismatched item of some description, and Brigid found herself drawn to the one nearest to where they had climbed down the shelves. Inside, she saw an old-fashioned barrel organ, finished in lustrous mahogany with a large wheel at each of the four corners of its base. She leaned closer, peering at the strange item until her forehead brushed against the cool glass of its containment box.

“So,” Kane asked, “what is all this?”

Brigid turned away from the cabinet. “Storeroom?” she proposed with some uncertainty.

“You said this place had become buried,” Grant said, “which means we’re at the top of the building. Meaning it’s an attic full of junk. Nothing unusual about that.”

Kane glanced around him, checking several of the cabinets. The nearest held an empty wooden chair, and in the one beside it a single bullet rested on a plinth. “Trophy room maybe,” he suggested. “Where old man Flag kept his treasures.”

“I wonder what they all mean,” Brigid said, her quiet voice echoing through the vastness of the chamber as they made their way toward a doorway at the far end of the room.

Kane gestured to the large wooden throne that stood inside the nearby cabinet, indicating the strange ideographs that decorated its surface. “Looks like Egyptian writing,” he said.

Brigid glanced at it for a second. “Aztec,” she corrected him.

Trailing behind them, Grant cast his eyes across all the curiosities in the vast room. “So, what was this Flag guy?” he rumbled, his voice echoing in the room. “Some kind of collector of junk?”

“He was an adventurer, like us,” Brigid explained, leading them past the cabinet with the bullet inside, checking her portable scanner with a furrowed brow.

They stepped out of the room of curiosities and found themselves on a balcony containing an old-fashioned radio receiver. The balcony overlooked a huge area that stretched farther than they could readily make out. The area contained two desks and several comfortable seats, but the vast majority of it was dedicated to what appeared to be a scientific laboratory. The lab was stocked to an almost obsessive degree, featuring equipment whose nature Kane couldn’t even begin to guess. Above and to the sides, the walls and ceiling appeared to be made of pure ice, twinkling in place as the light played over its smooth surface.

“This is nothing like the schematics,” Brigid said as she consulted the palm-size tracker screen.

“Schematics can be wrong,” Kane reminded her with a shrug, his eyes still fixed on the level below them.

“Not these,” Brigid told him, tapping at the portable screen with her fingernail. “This is a portable sonar unit. It should be able to give us an accurate representation of where we are.”

“And…?” Kane encouraged warily.

“According to this,” Brigid said, showing Grant and Kane the display, “we’re standing in a wall. I mean, right inside a wall.”

Kane felt decidedly uncomfortable when he heard that, a jab of fear running through his spine. Irritated, he calmed himself, demanding that he behave rationally. “It’s just an empty, forgotten redoubt, same as dozens of others we’ve visited,” Kane stated firmly, making his way along the balcony toward a stairwell. The stairwell was built in a subtle curve that doubled back on itself, forming a double helix.

“What does it mean?” Grant asked. “Is your dohickey on the fritz?”

“It’s tracking us just fine,” Brigid assured them. “No, this is something far more subtle. I think that this place, this Laboratory of the Incredible, has stealth technology that can confuse tracking systems, so that it cannot be spied upon.”

Pushing back his hood, Grant ran a hand over his cropped hair and whistled. “When did you say this place was built?”

“I’d say 1920-something,” Brigid replied. “Nobody’s quite sure. Flag would disappear for months at a time, and there’s every possibility that he built this place in sections as he required it. Likely, I’d say.”

“Any idea how?” Grant asked.

“He used some kind of sonic drill, I think,” Brigid said. “A pretty powerful one.”

Kane looked around at the glasslike walls. “Stealth technology,” he said. “For a building. In 1920. You have got to be kidding.”

“Professor Flag was a scientist of exceptional ability,” Brigid reminded him as she followed down the stairwell with Grant at her side. “Years—perhaps decades—ahead of any of his peers.”

“So the guy was a genius,” Grant said.

Brigid considered Grant’s statement for a few seconds before she responded. “That term might actually be construed as an insult,” she said. “The man was extraordinarily intelligent. ‘Genius’ doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.”

Stepping from the curved stairwell, Kane walked a few paces across the laboratory and looked all around. “Any idea what this Flag guy looked like?” he asked as Brigid and Grant came over to join him.

“I’ve examined the photographs in the Cerberus database,” Brigid began.

“Let me guess,” Kane interrupted. “Six foot six, square jaw, short dark hair—military style?”

Brigid nodded. “Why do you ask?”

“Because he’s standing right behind you,” Kane said.

Chapter 4

Brigid and Grant spun, turning to face the stranger who stood where Kane was indicating. Grant’s Sin Eater handgun snapped into his hand, propelled from its hiding place at his wrist holster.

The Sin Eater was the official sidearm of the Magistrate Division, and both Grant and Kane had kept them from their days as Mags in Cobaltville. An automatic handblaster, the Sin Eater was less than fourteen inches in length at full extension and fired 9 mm rounds. The whole unit folded in on itself to be stored in a bulky holster just above the user’s wrist. The holsters reacted to a specific flinching of the wrist tendons, which powered the pistol automatically into the gunman’s hand. The trigger had no guard, as any kind of safety features for the weapon had been ruled redundant. Thus, if the user’s index finger was crooked at the time it reached his hand, the pistol would begin firing without delay.

Beside Grant, Brigid Baptiste’s hand whipped down to the hip holster where she stored her trusted TP-9 tactical pistol, a bulky, automatic handblaster in dull black finish. The butt was almost central to the unit, making it appear almost like a square block finished by the wielder’s hand.

Although Brigid’s training was recent, all three Cerberus warriors were schooled in numerous forms of combat, from hand-to-hand martial arts to the use of knives, pistols, rifles and antitank weaponry. Furthermore, all three had the honed, lightning-fast reflexes that familiarity, muscle memory and combat awareness brought. In short, Brigid, Grant and Kane could more than adequately acquit themselves in any given combat scenario.

Right now, however, combat was not required. Grant and Brigid relaxed as they saw the man now standing before them. It was Abraham Flag, all right, although to describe him as “standing” was not entirely accurate. He was held upright inside what appeared to be a glass cylinder. The clear glass of the cylinder was somewhat obscured by a bluish, misty gas that floated within, through which they could see that the man inside was naked. His eyes were closed and, despite standing upright, he seemed almost relaxed, as though in a deep, dreamless sleep. Large metal pipes fed the cylinder, and Brigid noticed a control podium off to the right. No noise exuded from the strange construct, but the misty gas drifted in languid, faltering curlicues within the tube.

Kane’s laughter came to their ears, as Brigid and Grant relaxed. “Boy, you two can really move when you want to,” he said when they glared at him, still chuckling as he spoke.

Grant holstered his Sin Eater with a casual flick of his wrist, while Brigid made her way across to the control podium that was attached to the strange cylinder by a series of wires and copper pipes. There were controls integrated into the flat surface of the desk itself, like paintings on the reverse of a glass pane, and a foolscap notebook rested atop the unit. Brigid brushed dust from the glass work top and looked at the information displayed there. A series of dials was set beneath the glass of the unit, their needles held steady at about the three-quarters mark on their respective gauges. Beside them, a seven-digit analog counter slowly turned, and Brigid watched for a few seconds as the wheel to the farthest right ticked past 3 and rolled on toward 4. Then she picked up the notebook and flicked through its pages, finding that it was full of calculations written in blue ink with an elaborate hand.

“What do we have?” Grant asked as he and Kane strode over to join Brigid at the podium.

“He’s a freezie,” she said. “Cryogenically frozen and held in stasis here since—” she ran her finger along the index page of the notebook before flicking through several pages and finding the information “—November 1, 1930.”

Kane whistled in amazement and paced over to the glass cylinder to take a closer look at the man inside. He was a muscular individual, well-built and broad shouldered, with a firm jaw and high brow. “He doesn’t look much more than—what?—thirty-five, maybe forty.”

“This is cryogenic research,” Brigid said, indicating the book, “far in advance of anything Professor Flag’s contemporaries would have been working on.”

“The guy’s a supergenius, remember,” Grant stated.

“Supergenius or not, this is really quite remarkable,” Brigid told them both. She closed the notebook and placed it back on the glass work top. “You can be the smartest Neanderthal in the cave, but it still won’t do you much good to design a computer until someone develops the microchip. Flag’s notes here indicate that he bypassed so many hurdles with regards to the limitations of the technology around him. I mean, look at him. He’s a 250-year-old man, and he has been perfectly cryogenically preserved.”

Kane looked at the impressive man standing before him in the glass cabinet. “Kind of vain, though, isn’t it?”

“What?” Brigid asked.

“Why freeze yourself?” Kane asked. “Dead is dead—why prolong it any more than you need to?”

“I don’t think he died, Kane,” Brigid considered. “I think maybe something terrible happened back in 1930, and this was his way of keeping out of its path.”

Kane knocked the cylinder with the edge of his fist. “Yeah, great job. Happy 250th, Sleepy.”

Kane stepped away from the cylinder and headed back into the vast laboratory area, peering this way and that. “Anyway, let’s go see if we can find this knife thing,” he said. “Hopefully there’s a map somewhere. I don’t want to be wandering around this place forever.”

Brigid and Grant followed, spreading out so that the three of them could scope out the vast Laboratory of the Incredible as quickly and efficiently as possible. Working swiftly and methodically, they checked work surfaces and desks, opened cabinets and looked beneath wipe-clean work tops, pushing aside notebooks and Bunsen burners, beakers and glass tubes. There were bottles and jars full of strange concoctions, and many of them appeared to hold crystals or small deposits of salt. Kane presumed these had once been liquid, too, but had evaporated over the vast passage of time since anyone had last walked through this strange and startling laboratory.

“You think he’ll ever wake up?” Grant asked, calling across the room to Brigid as he peered behind a rudimentary spectrograph.

“I only glanced at his notes,” she admitted, scanning the shelves of a freestanding cabinet, “but it looked like he couldn’t finalize the wake-up protocols in time.”

Leafing through some loose papers at a desk, Kane stopped what he was doing and looked over at Brigid warily. “In time for what?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Brigid said. “Do you want me to read the notebook, or do you want me to look for the knife?”

“Well, let’s start by…” Kane began and then his words tailed off. Suddenly, like an anxious rabbit, he stood to his full height and looked off to the far end of the room. “You hear that?” he asked, his voice a whisper.

“What?” Grant asked, keeping his own voice low.

Silently, Kane indicated ahead of them to where a brightly lit doorway waited. With a swift hand gesture, he stalked toward the doorway, encouraging his partners to follow.

“This had better not be another joke,” Brigid muttered as she pulled the TP-9 from its holster once more.

Kane hurried forward, his body low as he made his way to the doorway. Peering inside, he observed that it opened into a short corridor that led to another doorway just a dozen paces ahead. The noises were coming from beyond the second doorway.

Grant edged up beside Kane, giving his partner a concerned look. “What have we got?” he whispered. Grant had known Kane for years, and he knew that his partner had remarkable instincts, what Kane would call his “point-man sense.” In reality, the point-man sense was a combination of spatial awareness and the refined use of Kane’s other senses to become almost spiritually at one with his surroundings. In their days as Cobaltville Magistrates, Kane’s point-man sense had saved Grant’s life on more than one potentially lethal occasion.

Kane made a face before he stepped into the brightly lit corridor. His face said it all: whatever it was, it was probably trouble.

Grant held his hands loose at his sides as he followed Kane along the walkway, walking on the balls of his feet so as to make as little noise as possible. From the far end, where the vast laboratory stood, Brigid waited, TP-9 in hand, scanning the corridor and the doorway that led to the room beyond.

Reaching the doorway, Kane held up his hand, instructing the others to wait but to hold their positions. There were definitely noises coming from the next room, people’s voices and the sounds of movement. Warily, Kane eased forward on silent tread and peered through the open doorway.

The room beyond was roughly hexagonal in shape, approximately fifteen feet across, and with a ceiling that was much lower than the laboratory area, just ten feet above the flooring. Like the rest of the strange headquarters, the walls to the room appeared to be constructed of ice, but it was much darker than the other areas that Kane and his companions had visited, reminding Kane of snow turned to slush. Light came from overhead in a single beam that lit the center of the room. There, standing in the center on a pedestal, stood a glass cabinet, similar in construction to those that the Cerberus team had encountered in the room they had originally broken into. This one, however, had reinforced wooden struts along its edges. The cabinet held a single item—a knife. Kane guessed that the knife was fifteen inches in length, including the handle, and it appeared to be carved from stone. Even from this distance, Kane could see the writing along its blade, though he didn’t recognize the language itself. To one side of the blade, trapped within the glass cabinet like a fly in amber, a streak of darkness like a smear of paint seemed to hover in the air. As Kane moved his head, he saw the darkness glitter, like stars in the night sky.

There were people in the room, too, a dozen of them. Although none of them wore a specific uniform, they all seemed to be of a type to Kane’s eyes. There were eight men and four women milling hurriedly about the room. One man was running a handheld scanning device over the glass display case, and several people were consulting laptop displays, running diagnostics as the information was fed to them. A tall woman was pacing the room impatiently, barking orders, while a broad-shouldered man watched her, shaking his head. Several armed guards stood to the edges of the room, looking uninterested in the whole affair, doubtless having already scanned the buried headquarters and found no one within.

Kane realized with a start that these people had arrived here before the Cerberus team, and had either used or created a different entrance. Given the size of the Laboratory of the Incredible, and the snowstorm raging outside, it would have been easy to remain utterly unaware of any other intruders unless they actually crossed paths.

“What about if we just break the cabinet, then?” the woman was saying, an irritated edge to her voice. She was tall—exceptionally so for a woman, almost certainly over six feet in height—with dark hair cut to fall just below her shoulders. She wore a formfitting outfit finished in matte-black leather, with red piping that accentuated her lithe frame. Kane could see a small pistol held in a holster at the rounded swell of her hip.

“We’ll unlock it, Simona,” the broad-shouldered man said in a placating tone. He was dressed in a similar black outfit, and sported a holstered gun hanging low to his hip. His hair was almost entirely shaved, with just the dark hint of stubble across his scalp along with two plaits that trailed down behind his right ear, falling over his shoulder where their ends were clamped with two metal beads. “Calm yourself, there’s no rush.”

“I just want to get out of here, Carver,” she said, stopping before him with her back to Kane and the doorway. “This place is…abnormal.”

Standing this close, Kane saw that, like many tall women, Simona was strangely shapeless, with small breasts and only a slight curvature at her hips in the otherwise flat line leading from shoulder to ankle. It made her seem that much taller, and somehow more graceful as she moved, like a person designed by aeronautic engineers to reduce drag.

“Heck, I didn’t think you’d scare so easy,” Carver said, his voice now rumbling with a cheerful tone. “Don’t tell me that wacky mirror freaked you out.”

“It’s not fear,” Simona snapped. “Just a healthy desire for efficiency. The sooner we wrap up this op and get back to the Millennial Consortium HQ, the sooner we get paid, fed and off this fucking iceberg.”

“You’re not really a winter person, are you?” Carver chided.

“I’ve wasted three months in that damned tent, searching for this hole in the ground,” Simona growled. “I just want it to be over. Don’t you?”

Reluctantly, Carver agreed.

Standing a little way back from the doorway, Grant looked at Kane and raised his eyebrows as they watched the scene unfold.

“Millennial Consortium,” Kane mouthed in response to his partner’s unasked question.

Kane, Grant and Brigid had crossed paths with the millennialists on a number of occasions. Twenty-third-century scavengers, they were pirates who profited by salvaging old technology and either selling it to the highest bidder or using it to their own ends. Often, the millennialists would attempt to do both at once. The Millennium Consortium was a vast organization, with branches in several locations and the technology and resources to back up impressive operations the world over. In theory, the millennialists had noble aims: the furthering of humankind and a recovery from the sick days that had followed the downfall of humanity at the end of the nuclear ravages of the twenty-first century. However, in practice, Kane knew, they were a selfish organization, whose only true goal was power, a goal they would readily achieve no matter what—or who—stood in their way.

Reluctantly, Kane stepped away from the doorway and, walking backward, made his way silently along the corridor, leaving Grant in place. At the far end of the corridor, Brigid looked up at Kane hopefully.

“We’ve located the knife,” Kane told her, his voice low, “but there’s one hell of a complication.”

Brigid raised one perfectly shaped, red-gold eyebrow.

“Millennialists got here first,” Kane explained.

“Damn,” Brigid spit. “How many?”

Kane shrugged noncommittally. “How important is this thing? Be honest now, Baptiste.”

“Why? Do you think you have a chance to snatch it?” Brigid asked.

“I think they’re crap odds and we’re better off making a tactical withdrawal,” Kane growled, “but I’m willing to listen to counterarguments if you have any.”

Brigid nodded toward the doorway at the far end of the corridor. “How many?” she asked again.

“Twelve,” Kane said, “all of them armed.”

Kane watched Brigid for a moment as the slightest crease appeared on her pale forehead while she thought. Then her eyes widened and she reached out to grab his arm, pulling him toward her.

“I think counterarguments will have to wait,” Brigid said as the familiar sounds of gunfire shattered the quiet of the laboratory.

Kane turned and looked over his shoulder. Grant was rushing toward him at full sprint, and the Sin Eater had materialized once again in the big man’s hand.

“We’ve been spotted,” Grant shouted as he ran from the corridor amid a hail of bullets.

Chapter 5

October 31, 1930

Isle Terandoa Naval Base, the South Pacific

“Godkiller.” Abraham Flag repeated the word slowly, as though feeling its sharp edges with his tongue. “An ominous name for a weapon.”

“Seems pretty weird to me, Professor,” Barnaby B. Barnaby said in his cultured New Haven accent.

“It is hardly unprecedented to name a weapon,” Flag reminded his archaeologist friend. “Think of Excalibur, or Mjolnir, Thor’s hammer. There is a great symbolism to the naming of an item. Ancient people often believed that names were sources of immense power.”

Little Ant was still poring over his notes. “But Godkiller, Chief,” he chimed in. “Well, it ain’t exactly subtle, is it?”

“Nor, I imagine, is being stabbed with a twelve-inch blade of carved stone,” Flag pointed out, but there was no hint of malice or superiority in his tone. He turned the knife over once more in his white-gloved hands. “Do you have a workable translation of the text, Little Ant?” he asked.

“I got most of it,” Little Ant assured him, “though it ain’t nothin’ pleasant. There’s a lot of lamentations, the destruction of an enemy’s family tree and some stuff about being returned to Tiamat.”

“Tiamat,” Flag repeated, placing the strange stone knife back on the desk. “She was the great mother of the Annunaki, the family of gods from Mesopotamian and Sumerian mythology. Some myth fragments suggest that she kept her squabbling children in line as they waged their endless battles across heaven and Earth.”

“Sounds like a tough old broad,” Little Ant remarked jovially as he replaced his modest notebook into his breast pocket.

Abraham Flag’s amethyst eyes took on an eerie, distant quality as he turned to look out of the small window of the office. Sunlight streamed through the pane, its golden rays playing along the length of the odd stone knife. Out there, beyond the wire fence that surrounded the naval base, a lush jungle stood poised, brimming with the colorful plant life of Isle Terandoa. “If the stories are accurate,” Flag said finally, his voice low, “the Annunaki were beings of immense power, the likes of which have never been seen before or since.”

Barnaby shook his head in disbelief, his tousled red hair flopping this way and that. “Gods, Professor?” he scoffed. “They’re just stories.”

Flag turned back to his companions, his eyes playing across the dark-colored blade. “The artifact before us would suggest otherwise, Barnaby,” Flag stated, an ominous edge creeping into his voice.

Both Little Ant and Barnaby B. Barnaby had worked alongside Abraham Flag for many years, racking up a score of adventures across the globe. Neither man had ever seen their de facto leader look as concerned as he did at that moment.

Little Ant shrugged. “You really think a stone knife is gonna do much hurt to anyone, Chief?” he asked.

Flag’s gaze met with Little Ant’s, and such was its penetrating quality that, even though the little linguist had known the impressive man of science for a dozen years, he found himself shying away. “If this blade belonged to the Annunaki, then we should presume that there is far more to it than meets the eye.”

“Like what?” Little Ant asked, a quaver in his voice. “You think it’s got one of them death rays or something hidden inside?”

“I held it for less than a minute,” Flag considered, “and in that time I could feel that something about it was different. Had you not noticed?”

Flag’s companions looked disconcerted. They were familiar with his prodigious powers of observation, but the man was usually so sure of himself that it was a rare day that he would request confirmation from anyone else.

“What kind of a ‘something,’ Professor?” Barnaby asked.

“Yeah,” Little Ant added. “We been with this thing for a coupla days an’ I didn’t notice no ‘somethings.’”

“It is subtle,” Flag admitted, “but the knife has a vibrating quality. Infinitesimal, I’ll grant you, but it is ever moving, as though in a constant state of flux.”

“It looks solid enough,” Barnaby stated, “but what you’re describing sounds more like it’s made of gas.”

“It does indeed have the appearance of a solid object,” Flag assured him, removing and pocketing his white gloves, “and yet I would wager that your description that it is made of gas is—at the subatomic level—a reasonable analysis.”

Then the professor’s tanned hand reached forward, the fingers spread widely as they closed in on the knife. But he did not touch the curious weapon. Instead, Abraham Flag held his hand in what appeared to be an open grip, running his widespread fingers along the very edges of the blade, never once touching it. “It has an aura,” Flag confirmed. “I would need to perform a full analysis before I can be certain of what that aura is, but I can assure you that it is there.”

Flag’s companions looked at each other, utterly baffled. Although Flag was renowned as a man of science, he was in fact a polymath, a scholar of many disciplines. In combining the many great bodies of knowledge that he had absorbed, Flag could bring his analytical mind to bear on the most esoteric of subjects. Even so, the words he was speaking now seemed to belong to an utterly different world view from the one to which he subscribed, and that paradigm shift caught his companions off guard for just a second.

Little Ant was the first to speak, voicing his reservations in his famously cheery way. “It sounds like a load of old hooey to me, Chief.”

Barnaby’s face turned red and he glared at the diminutive linguist. “‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy’,” the archaeologist assured him angrily, quoting Shakespeare. “You buffoon,” he added, shaking his head.

“Hey, who ya callin’ a buffoon, you dust-diggin’ goliath?” Little Ant snapped back.

Flag ignored them. He had seen this argument played out a thousand times by his companions, and he knew that, despite appearances, it was an amicable way of letting off steam. Instead, it was the ancient knife that played on Flag’s thoughts. It had to have lain at the bottom of the ocean for thousands of years before being brought back to the surface with the shift of the tectonic plates that had revealed Isle Terandoa. Without proper study, Flag couldn’t be certain, but his instincts told him that this strange stone knife was incredibly dangerous.

DEMY OCTAVO HURRIED through the dense undergrowth of Isle Terandoa, propelling herself with swift strides of her long, shapely legs. The U.S. Navy clearly considered the island to be secure, she realized as she pushed thick fronds aside and sidled close to the wire fence that surrounded the naval base. There was the occasional sentry patrol, but their movements were languid and unhurried, a sign that it was considered routine rather than a conscious act to protect the base from potential infiltrators. They may well be able to repel a fleet of warships, but they were utterly unprepared for a single interloper.

The beautiful Signorina Octavo brushed aside the heavy leaves of a salmonberry bush, sweeping its rich pink flowers and yellowish fruit from her path. The wire fence stood barely six feet ahead of her now, and just a little beyond that, she could see the window to the small office where Abraham Flag consulted with his companions on the nature of the ancient Annunaki dagger. The window itself was closed, in spite of the heat of the day, and the dark-haired woman sneered with irritation at not being able to hear the discussion within.

No matter. Flag had led her right to the priceless knife, and its acquisition was all that concerned Octavo now. Whatever the nature of that strange stone blade, it could be examined by the fascist scientists of her native Italy as soon as she returned with it.

Her gloved fingers reached down, and Demy Octavo pulled one of the silver-handled Berettas from its resting place at her hip. She flipped the safety catch on the left-hand side, pulling it toward her to engage the weapon.

A thin, heartless smile creased those luscious, falu-red lips as the glamorous Italian special agent aimed the pistol at the tall figure pacing back and forth behind the office window. In a moment, she assured herself, her hated enemy, Abraham Flag, would be no more.

THE AIR WAS BECOMING noticeably warmer in the tiny office as Abraham Flag walked back and forth, weighing thoughts of the Annunaki blade with his razor-keen intellect. The uncomfortable warmth was the effect of three bodies in such an enclosed space, he knew, but that mild discomfort made him conscious of something else: his need for privacy while he studied this queer object from another time.

“I shall take the stone knife to my laboratory,” Flag stated, his words cutting into the friendly bickering that was continuing between his two loyal companions.

Even as the words left his mouth, Flag sensed something behind him. He spun on his heel, turning to face the window at the exact instant that its glass pane shattered and a 9 mm bullet raced over his shoulder. Missing Flag by a fraction of an inch, the bullet zipped across the tiny room before embedding itself in the far wall with a dull thud.

“We’re under attack!” Flag cried as his companions took cover behind the desk.

As he spoke, Flag saw a familiar figure dressed in a brown leather flight suit moving just beyond the shattered window. It was Demy Octavo, leaping down from the wire fence that marked the border of the naval base. Flag was momentarily distracted as he admired her for a fraction of a second, her lithe, trim body like that of a dancer, her long, dark hair swirling in the island breeze. And then she raised the pistol in her right hand, and another 9 mm slug ripped through the space where the windowpane had been just a moment ago, blasting over Flag’s head and rushing onward into the room.

Abraham Flag did not take cover, however. Rather, he was already in motion, a whirling dervish as the glass of the window crunched beneath his booted feet. In a second, Demy Octavo leaped through the window, snapping her heels high in the air and passing through the frame without so much as brushing it, in a feat of incredible muscle control.

While Abraham Flag had been known to kill, he preferred not to arm himself with a gun. He had no objection to the use of ultimate force if it was required; he simply felt that carrying a gun was largely unnecessary when other means existed to halt a foe’s progress. As such, the incredible man of science now found himself unarmed and staring down the loaded barrel of a Beretta Model 1915.

“Good afternoon, Professor Flag,” the beautiful gun mistress said in English, her throaty voice displaying just the faintest hint of her exotic accent.

Flag saw the slightest hesitation in the woman’s eyes, as Octavo went to pull the trigger. He used that momentary hesitation—which could have been no more than an eighth of a second—to shift his head out of the path of the 9 mm slug as it left the barrel and raced through the air toward him. Then, as the bullet clipped past Flag’s ear, his hand whipped out and snatched the pistol before Octavo could loose another shot.

Octavo cried out as the pistol left her hand, along with her glove, which was caught up by Flag’s swift action. As her glove fell to the floor with a slap, the beautiful Italian turned on Flag, hissing like an enraged cat.

Abraham Flag’s eyes never left Octavo’s, but his fingers worked in a blur of movement. In less than two seconds, he had deconstructed the Beretta with one hand, dropping the component parts to the hard floor of the tiny office. But that minuscule distraction had been enough. As the barrel, grip and trigger guard tinkered to the wooden floor, Demy Octavo’s fist snapped out, connecting with Flag’s square jaw.

Caught off guard, Flag took a step backward, reeling from the savage blow. That momentary stumble threatened to cost Flag—and by extension the U.S. government—plenty. Signorina Octavo swooped down at the object resting on the desk like a hawk swooping down on a field mouse, snatching the stone knife in her right hand. She was still moving as Flag recovered, her tall body twisting as she jumped back to the window.

“Look out, Professor!” Barnaby B. Barnaby called from his hiding place behind the desk. “That incorrigible Italian ingenue is escaping. And she’s got our knife!”

Octavo leaped once more through the shattered window, an angry snarl marring her flawless features. She had the ancient artifact, but she had lost one of her precious Beretta pistols during the scuffle. Landing on the tarmac beyond the broken window, Demy Octavo took off at a run, the heels of her Italian leather boots clip-clopping against the ground as she made her way past the administration block.

“Where’s she goin’, Chief?” Little Ant asked as he watched the woman hurry away.

Instantaneously, Flag recalled the layout of the naval base. “She’s heading toward the main dock of the base!” he exclaimed. “Signorina Octavo is either planning to steal a boat…or my plane. Come on, let’s go.” As he said those final words, Flag was at the door to the office, running out into the corridor at a fast clip.

Outside, Demy Octavo had already reached the long airstrip where Flag has landed his experimental aircraft less than an hour before. She was as graceful as a gazelle as her arms pumped, and her long legs strove forward, the ancient knife clutched firmly in her right hand.

Two sailors were refueling Flag’s curious air vehicle as Octavo appeared from around the side of the two-story administration building. Nearby, another group of sailors—eight in all—were busy at work refitting a one-man submarine. The sub was still in the testing stages, the parts laid out along the concrete skirt beside the airstrip. All of the naval personnel looked up at the sound of running feet, and were surprised and baffled when they saw the striking form of the Italian special agent sprinting toward them.

Behind Octavo, the door to the administration block crashed open and Professor Flag came running out with his two mismatched partners hot on his heels. “Stop that woman!” Flag bellowed, his powerful voice needing no augmentation to be heard clear across the other side of the sunbaked airstrip.

One of the sailors who had been refueling Flag’s aircraft held up his hand, ordering Octavo to stop right where she was. In return, the cruel Italian doyenne brought up her right hand—the one that held the ancient stone knife—and swiped the blade across the unsuspecting sailor’s face.

With an agonized cry, the sailor fell to the smooth blacktop strip, a sudden crimson streak marring his youthful features.

Although they were rare, there were times when Abraham Flag regretted his policy of never carrying a gun. As he watched that brave sailor fall to his knees, the young man’s face a ruined mosaic of pouring blood, he felt that pang of regret once more. Despite Flag’s years training his body to an incredible level of physical fitness, Octavo had had too much of a head start and Flag’s own actions had not been fast enough. Now the young lad would wear that hideous scar for the rest of his life, evidence of the coldhearted cruelty of Mussolini’s fascist desires. Armed with the swift justice of a bullet, Flag might have halted Octavo in her tracks, wounded or killed her before she could cause any further damage.

As regrets darkened Abraham Flag’s mind, Demy Octavo drew her second Beretta handgun from its holster and began to wave it at the shocked sailors standing along the airstrip.

“Everybody keep back,” she warned, her voice as harsh as the ugly punishment she had just doled out to the sailor.

Showing their hands, the sailors backed away, their eyes fixed on the muzzle of that lethal handgun. But Abraham Flag’s eyes had been drawn elsewhere. Instead of stopping, he drove himself harder, running at full speed to catch up to the Italian infiltrator, outpacing his companions with his huge strides.

Still holding the sailors at bay with her silver-handled Beretta, Demy Octavo turned at the sound of Flag’s running feet. “Stop right where you are, Professor,” she ordered, “or their blood will be on your hands.”

As if to prove the seriousness of her threat, Octavo pulled the trigger, and a bullet spit from her gun, spearing through the air over the heads of the wary sailors.

Now twenty feet from Octavo, Flag stopped, his eyes fixed on the scene before him. “Demy, no!” Flag cried, and it seemed that there was the slightest trace of fear in the great man’s voice. “Stop!”

Octavo laughed, a vicious, ugly sound from such a beautiful face. “I’ll be leaving now, Professor, and no one will dare stop me,” she assured him, taking a step toward his waiting aircraft.

Abraham Flag fixed the woman with his stare, his incredible amethyst eyes exerting an almost hypnotic power. “Please, Demy,” he said, his voice calm once more. “Look at the knife.”

Suspicious of a trick, Demy Octavo glanced at the stone knife in her hand. Its strange, dark surface rippled with sunlight, and yet the glow seemed somehow unnatural, as though it didn’t really belong. Across from Octavo, still kneeling on the airstrip with his bloody face in his hands, the wounded sailor was clearly going into shock. But there was something else about him, something different. From beneath the sailor’s hands, Octavo saw that selfsame glow, tinged with red and pulsing like something organic. As the man lowered his hands, he revealed a rent in his face that was so unnatural as to defy description.

Flag had sensed as much as seen the nightmarish change to the young sailor’s face. It wasn’t simply a cut, the way a knife would cut. It seemed almost as though that ancient blade had burned him like acid, eating into the flesh and sinews that hid beneath his fragile skin. But there was more to it than that. The young man was wounded at a cellular level; the very fiber that made up his being had been damaged in a manner that utterly defied human comprehension.

For an awful moment, the name of the stone blade bubbled to the surface of Flag’s thoughts once more: Godkiller.

But it wasn’t just the young sailor’s face that had been altered. Demy Octavo was changing, too, as she clutched the knife in her elegant hand. She stood there looking at it, holding the blade in front of her as though transfixed.

“Demy,” Flag urged, his voice firm, “Miss Octavo? Please, put down the knife.”

For a moment, Octavo did nothing. She just stood, as still as a statue, as the Pacific sun beat down on the thin black line of the naval airstrip. And then, in a movement that seemed eerily inhuman, her head turned and she looked at Abraham Flag with a fierce anger in her eyes. Those deep brown eyes seemed darker now, but that was not the most remarkable thing that struck Flag as he stared into the orbs; it was their whites. For their whites were no longer white at all—they had taken on a crimson aspect as the blood bubbled within them.

“Put the knife down, Demy,” Flag urged once again. “It’s not safe.”

In response, Demy Octavo’s lips pulled back in an animal’s sneer.

Chapter 6

Early twenty-third century

Laboratory of the Incredible, Antarctica

Seven armed troops came rushing from the corridor after Grant, and a moment later the clattering of feet from the far end of the vast laboratory area revealed more had been skulking in the distant shadows.

Kane and Brigid were already running, weaving between work surfaces covered with electrical coils, vacuum tubes, microscopes and a dense forest of other scientific equipment. As he ran, Kane tensed his wrist tendons and the Sin Eater shot into his grip. He could already feel the angry determination welling inside as a hail of bullets whipped past him and Brigid.

A little behind his colleagues, Grant leaped over a desk, sliding across it on his buttocks and back, blasting a burst of fire behind him from the muzzle of his own Sin Eater. His shots peppered the doorway around the corridor, felling two of the millennialists and driving the others to cover.

Smashing beakers and test tubes out of his way, Grant landed on the far side of the desk amid a rain of breaking glass. Righting himself, the huge ex-Mag turned this way and that, searching for Kane and Brigid as gunfire echoed all around him. He spotted his partners crouch-walking between two rows of worktables roughly twelve feet away.

“What happened?” Kane snapped as Grant caught his attention.

“What always happens,” Grant replied. “Somebody looked up at the wrong time.”

Kane stopped moving for a moment and peered over the desk he had crouched behind, looking across to the corridor. “We should have just ambushed them while we had the chance,” he chastised himself as he saw millennialist guards piling out of the exit there.

From the doorway to the corridor, someone shouted, “There’s three of them.”

A moment later, a cacophony of shots filled the air, shattering glass beakers and monitor screens on the work tops that he and his companions had taken refuge behind. The guards were followed a moment later by the dark-haired woman whom Kane had identified as Simona, striding through the open doorway, her high-heeled boots clattering against the hard floor with the pounding of a jackhammer. Kane saw her face properly for the first time, and not just the profile. It looked aristocratic, long with a pleasing curve to the chin. Kane noticed something else about it—something dark was marring the whole left-hand side of the woman’s face. Before he could ponder any further on this, the woman raised her voice, shouting instructions in an authoritative tone.

“Don’t damage anything,” she ordered. “The material in this laboratory could be invaluable to our cause.”

Invaluable was good, Kane thought. It gave them a chance to do more than dodge bullets. He switched on his Commtact and began to outline his plan, subvocalizing his instructions to Grant as he ushered Brigid toward the double-helix staircase at the far end of the vast laboratory room. “These ice rats have got us outgunned and outnumbered,” he said, “and it sounds like the only thing stopping them from shooting us where we stand is the equipment in this lab. Let’s use that to our advantage and get ourselves out of here while we still can.”

Brigid turned to Kane as they rushed through the lab. “You’re crazy,” she spit. “We can’t just leave—”

“Kane’s right,” Grant’s voice stated over their linked Commtacts. “I don’t much want to get shot in the head today, so let’s just get back to the Mantas and call this one a bust.”

“But the Annunaki blade—” Brigid began.

Kane silenced her with a look. “This isn’t the time,” he growled, and Brigid saw that steely determination in his gray-blue eyes.

As if in response, Brigid’s arm snapped up and she thrust the TP-9 handgun at Kane’s face. “Get down,” she yelled.

Kane didn’t stop to think. He was already dropping to the floor in a forward roll as Brigid’s semiautomatic weapon spit a burst of bullets where his head had been just a second before. Still rolling, Kane spun, tracking Brigid’s arc of fire with his own weapon. He saw three millennialist guards there, sprinting to keep pace with himself and his red-haired companion. One of the millennialists dropped as Brigid sprayed his head and torso with 9 mm bullets.

Fast runners, Kane thought with irritation as he righted himself and snapped off a quick burst from his crouching position on the shiny floor of the laboratory. The remaining Millennial Consortium men continued running, bearing down on Brigid as Kane’s bullets cut the air all about them. Several bullets clipped the guards, but only slowed them momentarily, their kinetic armor diffusing the impact of the blasts.

Then the two remaining guards were on Brigid, weaving past the worktables as they turned on her.

A little farther back, Grant was trading shots with another group of guards. The millennialists were wary, careful not to hit any of the potentially invaluable equipment in the lab. Grant used that to his advantage, peppering the lab with bullets and punishing any of his foes who broke cover.

The two millennialists who had chased down Brigid and Kane split up. Brigid fired another blast from her TP-9 at the nearer guard, but he rolled sideways just fractionally quicker than Brigid’s aim. A second later, the same guard sprung up from the work surface he had rolled behind, and his left leg whipped out in a snap kick. The guard’s foot slammed into Brigid’s stomach, and she flailed backward, a burst of fire from the TP-9 going wild, the bullets zipping into the air before disappearing with a staccato echo into the rafters of the vast room.

As Brigid recovered from that first, savage blow, the millennialist swung his right fist at her face, a small pistol clutched in his fingers blasting bullets through the air. Brigid stepped backward just quickly enough to avoid the shots, and, gun in hand, her foe’s fist whipped through the air just beside her.

Brigid’s reply was swift and deadly. Her right arm zipped up and her index finger locked on the trigger of the semiautomatic pistol she held, lacing her foe’s body with a stream of bullets that drew a continuous line from groin to face. The millennialist rocked backward with the bullets’ impacts as they smashed into his kinetic armor, and then he was toppling into the array of distillation equipment on a desk behind him. As blood spurted from his lips, the Millennial Consortium footman fell into the distillation tubes, smashing the fragile glass equipment to little more than a mosaic of shattered glass.

Just two desks over, Kane was having his own problems with another of the guardsmen. Kane’s initial observation had been spot-on—his opponent was a fast runner. So fast that Kane suspected he had some kind of augmentation under his baggy winter clothing—perhaps a cybernetic upgrade, something like one of the mechanical suits his field team had encountered in Greece just months before.

Through luck or skill, the millennialist remained on his feet as Kane’s Sin Eater spit bullets at him. Then, in a blur, the man lunged at Kane, leaving the ground in a jump that took him several feet into the air. There was no time for Kane to react as his opponent’s pointed right foot snapped out and drilled him in the side of the head.

For several seconds Kane’s head reeled, and he felt as though he was falling. Even as he recovered his wits, Kane received the guard’s follow-up blow—a brutal kick that caught him in the ribs, rolling him across the floor.

As Kane reeled from the blow, he squeezed his eyes shut and sought his focus, stilling his mind and ignoring the stab of pain in his side.

A flurry of movement, and the millennialist was lining up a spinning kick with Kane’s head as its ultimate destination. Instinctively, Kane sent his Sin Eater back to its holster and reached above him with both hands. His hands grasped that approaching foot, which seemed nothing more than a blur, grabbing the ankle and snapping it backward. The attacker shrieked as he toppled back, his trapped ankle acting as the fulcrum to his plunge. The millennialist struck the floor solidly with the back of his head, and Kane released his leg and scurried forward, scrambling over his foe’s fallen body.

Kane’s right fist pumped forward, smashing the millennialist across the face, caving his nose in a burst of blood. As the guard’s head reeled from Kane’s first blow, the powerful ex-Mag pulled his right arm back as though for another swing. As he did so, Kane unclenched his fist and commanded the Sin Eater back from where it had retreated in his wrist holster just seconds earlier.

His eyes blurred in double vision from Kane’s first, thunderclap blow, the Millennial Consortium guard saw Kane’s fist approach his face a second time and saw the hard, black shape of the pistol forming within it like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. Then Kane’s hand seemed to flash in explosion as he unleashed the full extent of the Sin Eater’s unforgiving fury at his opponent’s head.

Kane leaped back from the bloodied corpse, turning to see how his partners were faring. Brigid came running toward him as her own foe lolled against the shattered distillation equipment. Behind her, Kane could see Grant scrambling between worktables as more of the millennialist soldiers spewed from the far corners of the stadium-sized laboratory.

“There could be a thousand treats on that hard drive,” Kane told Brigid through gritted teeth. “We can’t nab all of them. Now, let’s get up the stairs and make sure we’re alive long enough to grab the next one.”

Brigid continued running toward the staircase. She was annoyed, but she knew that Kane was right. Besides, there was every chance that Cerberus could acquire the blade from the Millennial Consortium at a later date—albeit at a high price. Reluctantly, Brigid led the way up the spiralling stairs toward the upper level. Kane scrambled after her, and a moment later Grant joined them as they hurried up the circling staircase.

“They’ve stopped shooting,” Grant said over the Commtact, relieved.

Kane peered over the high, icelike banister as he ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time. “But they are following,” he said.

“Guess they want to make sure we stay away,” Grant proposed as the Cerberus trio reached the top of the strange stairwell. “You know we could pick them off from up here,” he added, glancing back down at the scrambling figures who were fanning out across the lab, checking every area with grim efficiency.

Simona was bellowing fierce instructions, ordering her men to check everywhere to ensure that there were no other intruders in the buried laboratory.

Shaking his head, Kane jogged along the balcony toward the doorway of the trophy room. “Let’s just keep moving before we run into their backup,” he advised.

Ahead of Kane, Brigid was passing through the open doorway into the room at the apex of the buried Laboratory of the Incredible, heading back to the point through which the three of them had entered. As she moved into the trophy area, Kane’s words from just a moment before proved horribly prophetic. An arm snapped out from off to the side of the open doorway, grabbing Brigid around the throat and wrenching her off her feet before she knew what was happening. She swung the TP-9 pistol around and her finger jammed against the trigger, unleashing a spray of 9 mm, 158-gram subsonic bullets that sputtered around the brightly lit trophy room.

Kane bolted through the doorway after their companion, and saw Brigid move so swiftly to one side that he thought she had fallen.

“What the—?” Kane began as he heard the TP-9 spitting fire and saw Brigid being yanked backward, her heels sliding along the floor.

Brigid had been grabbed by a large man dressed in a thick coat with a fur lining, Kane saw. The man was over six feet tall, built like a grizzly bear and wearing a scarf and goggles that obscured his face. A Calico M-960 subgun hung from a strap over his shoulder. The long-barreled automatic rifle featured two handgrips for better control of the field of fire, and it was the preferred weapon of the Millennial Consortium. Kane took it for a sure sign that this man was with the other people they had encountered in the glacial fortress. And that could mean something else, too, Kane realized, his heart sinking—there may be even more millennialists just waiting to pounce on them.

TRAPPED IN THE huge man’s grasp, Brigid was struggling to find her footing, her boot heels scraping across the white floor as she was dragged backward away from the doorway. She finally unhooked her finger from the TP-9’s trigger, and the weapon went silent. She tried to gain purchase on the hard floor, but found that she was being pulled back so quickly that she couldn’t even regain her balance for a second.

Kane raised his Sin Eater, stilling his mind as he took aim at the man pulling his companion across the floor.

The huge millennialist dragged Brigid between the glass display cabinets of the room, swinging her this way and that, using her as a human shield to prevent Kane taking his shot. “Try it,” he growled, “and you’ll execute your girlfriend, chum.”

Kane held still, the Sin Eater tracking the man’s movements as he continued yanking Brigid to and fro.

“Now, why don’t you put your gun down,” the millennialist suggested, reaching for his swinging Calico subgun with his free hand.

“Better yet,” Kane snapped back, “why don’t you put my friend down and we’ll settle this like men.”

Just entering the doorway to the huge trophy hall, Grant’s voice came to Kane, urgency in its tone. “Kane, they’re coming up the stairs. Boxing us in.”

Kane’s eyes flicked around the room, taking in the curiosities that stood silent vigil in their glass boxes. Trinkets and tablets that glistened beneath the miraculous lighting from overhead: bones and stones; here a chunk of masonry shaped like a wing, there a frayed rope wrapped around itself in a knot as thick as a person’s torso.

Behind him, Kane heard the familiar sound of a Sin Eater as Grant blasted shots at the approaching enemies.

“Kane,” Grant urged as the first of the millennialists reached the top of the double-helix staircase and dived against the far wall for cover. “Time’s run out.”

“Not yet it hasn’t,” Kane growled, and the Sin Eater bucked in his hand as he fired a single shot at the millennialist holding Brigid.

The bullet cut through the distance between Kane and his foe, slicing three long strands from Brigid’s red hair as it passed her and smashed into the face of the man holding her. Immediately, the guard staggered backward, his grip faltering around Brigid’s neck. Brigid didn’t need any further opening than that. She was already regaining and shifting her balance, struggling forward and flipping her assailant over her shoulders. The man crashed to the floor in a heap of furs and trailing scarf.

“I’m fine, Kane,” Brigid called across the trophy room. “Let’s go.” Without waiting for an answer, she turned and began rushing across the trophy-filled room.

Kane and Grant were already moving, racing down the walkway between the huge glass cabinets. Brigid was sprinting toward the far wall, where the icelike shelves had formed the makeshift steps for their entry into Abraham Flag’s buried laboratory of wonder. Kane and Grant weaved between the cabinets that held the carved throne and the single bullet, making their way swiftly toward the far wall to join their red-haired companion.

Though knocked off his feet, the millennialist guard who had grabbed Brigid was not dead. He reached for his Calico M-960 as he lay on the floor beside a glass cabinet holding a single clay tablet. Kane’s bullet had indeed hit him; it had slammed into the goggles that he wore, impacting against the hard plastic of the right eyepiece, leaving a scar across its surface like a spiderweb. Beneath the goggles, the guard’s cheek ached, and he would have a black eye inside of an hour. But, other than disorienting him for five seconds, the bullet hadn’t created any lasting damage. Now he turned his subgun in the direction of the fleeing figures and pumped the trigger. A stream of flat-nosed 9 mm bullets spit from the muzzle of the Calico, spraying out over the trophy room. Automatically, Kane, Grant and Brigid dived for cover as the bullets raced toward them.

As his team ducked behind the tall glass cabinets of the room, the string of flat-nosed, wadcutter bullets smashed through the cabinet at Kane’s back, shattering the panes of glass and embedding themselves into the eerie, carved throne that waited silently within.

Guatemala, May 19, 1926

IT TOOK A FEW MOMENTS for his eyes to adjust when the sack-cloth bag was removed from Abraham Flag’s head. Warily, he looked around at his new surroundings. He was in a small, windowless room that appeared to be barely eight feet square. Lit by a single, flaming torch, the room held the distinct smells of dust and decrepitude.

When Flag tried to move, he found that his wrists were held in place. He looked down and saw the large wooden clips that had been placed over them like some tribal woman’s bracelet, clamping them to the arms of the solid wooden throne that he now sat upon. As hard as amethysts, his purple gaze played over the chair itself, examining the strange markings he saw there. The chair was covered in carvings, pictograms that Flag immediately recognized as the ancient written language of that dead race called the Aztecs.

Flag’s lightning-quick mind worked overtime, swiftly translating the words that he could see, ascertaining their meaning as swiftly as he was able. The meaning of those symbols was clear: it was a throne of execution.

Suddenly, Flag became aware of movements behind him, and then a sinister voice came from close to his shoulder. “I see you are awake, Professor Flag,” a man’s voice stated. The man spoke in heavily accented English, and Flag recognized almost immediately that the speaker was from the Latino region of Central America.

“You have me at a disadvantage, friend,” Flag replied. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

“‘A disadvantage’ would be a more than fair analysis, Professor,” the man said, stepping from the shadows. Flag saw that he was a short man, carrying a little extra weight and dressed entirely in white. A vicious-looking scar ran down the right-hand side of his face, ending several inches into the man’s hairline. The man’s hair was hidden by a magnificent headdress of feathers, each of them dyed a vivid, bloodred. “You may call me Mr. Hidalgo. I am the man who will kill you before this day is out.”

Abraham Flag had heard that same threat in numerous forms over the length of his career, and he felt no trepidation at facing death once again. Instead, he merely smiled at the irony of the man’s name, for hidalgo meant noble in Spanish, the strangely garbed man’s native tongue. This hidden threat had been close by ever since Flag had journeyed down to Guatemala to help with Michael Brand’s construction project and encountered that first hideous corpse. Only now had that threat finally been given a face. The terrible, twisted and scarred visage owned by Mr. Hidalgo, the revived priest of the blood-thirsty Aztecs.

“The chair that you now sit in,” Hidalgo explained, “has lain beneath this pyramid since its construction over three thousand years ago. It is a throne for the dead, and all who sit in it must surely die.”

As Hidalgo spoke, Flag could feel a cold shiver wrenching at his spine. There was something about this chair, some uncanny ability that could affect a man in ways almost beyond comprehension. The ideographs were more than simple representations of its purpose—they acted in some way to channel a person’s will, forcing them to die, their heart to cease beating.

“You feel it already, Professor Flag,” Hidalgo said, wide teeth showing in a sickening smile. “You feel the dreaded march of death’s approach.”

This strange throne was the primitive equivalent of an electric chair, Flag realized, but one that was powered solely through the will of the executioner himself. Flag’s only means of survival was to outthink Hidalgo before the dreams of death overcame him.

Flag narrowed his eyes and concentrated, his muscles tensing as his arms wrenched at the bonds that held them in place.

“You are a fool, Professor,” Hidalgo mocked as he saw Flag struggling at his restraints. “You cannot break those shackles—no man can. And, in a few moments, you shall be dead.”

Flag ignored the man’s ranting, concentrating on his inner strength, the nobility of purpose that had served him through the most dire of situations. He could feel Hidalgo’s thoughts in his mind now, sifting through them as a man’s hands will sift through sand. Suddenly, that terrible, invisible hand clawed within Flag’s skull, and the great man of science let loose a desperate gasp.

Hidalgo, that resurrected priest of a blood-soaked civilization of the ancient past, laughed as he tightened his mental grip on his victim, feeding all of his terrible hate through the strange and mystical chair through his thoughts alone. Trapped in that seat of doom, Abraham Flag fixed his fierce stare on the man in the abominable headdress, feeling the pressure bearing down upon his mind. His skull felt as though it might explode like some rotted fruit, but still Flag clung to life, recalling the miraculous things that he had discovered, thinking of all the sights he still had to see. And in that moment, something else flashed through his exceptional brain.

u x d + (c x s) - (t x b)

It was the incredible equation he had been developing at his hidden Laboratory of the Incredible in the Antarctic, the equation that proposed to hold the key to life itself. He concentrated all of his thoughts on the equation, on life itself.

Up x Down + (Charm x Strange) - (Top x Bottom)

As the equation raced through Flag’s thoughts, the ideographs on the chair began to glow and, incredibly, to alter their shape. The parable of death that had been written there just moments before changed, the millennia-old carvings shifting their lines subtly as their meaning altered forever at Flag’s command.

At first the priest, Hidalgo, failed to notice the extraordinary change that was occurring before his eyes. He stood in that tiny death chamber, grinning at Flag’s plight as he focused his thoughts to power that incredible, ancient machine. And then, like an old sheet finally wearing through, something in Hidalgo’s mind seemed to tear, ripping apart. The whites of his eyes took on an aspect of crimson as all of the capillaries burst, and blood trickled from his nose before he fell to the flagstone floor.

With a final strain of superhuman effort, Abraham Flag snapped the two shackles that held his wrists to the chair, their wood shattering into a thousand splinters as he leaped from that terrible throne of death….

KANE HELD HIS HAND over his face to protect his eyes as glass crashed down all around where he crouched on the trophy room’s floor. Swiftly, he ran his hand through his hair, and twinkling slivers of glass tinkered to the floor. “Son of a bitch,” he snarled, scrambling behind another cabinet and reeling off a burst of gunfire from his Sin Eater.

Kane’s bullets cleaved the air all around the Millennial Consortium guard, but the man rolled behind another cabinet, this one containing a carved stone wing from some long-forgotten statue.

“Kane,” Grant called from his own hiding place. When Kane looked, Grant was nodding toward the doorway. “More company.”

Kane glanced up and saw more millennialist guards rushing through the open doorway. Grant and Brigid peppered the doorway with a sustained burst, and one of the newcomers fell to the floor amid a spray of blood as his companions rushed to find cover.

“There’s no way we can get up top while they’re here,” Brigid said over the Commtact, her voice sounding frantic. “Any ideas?”

Kane’s eyes narrowed as he assessed the scene before him. They were trapped in a room full of pointless crap as a dozen armed men closed in on them. Reluctantly, he engaged his Commtact’s microphone. “I guess we play a game of Last Man Standing,” he growled.

Chapter 7

Sin Eater in hand, Kane backed up against a glass cabinet displaying nothing more than one lone bullet, its silver casing ringed with a single line of gold like a wedding band—a marriage of violence.

All around the brightly lit storage room, a dozen foot soldiers of the Millennial Consortium were finding their own cover as they hemmed in Kane and his companions. Both Grant and Brigid were somewhere off to Kane’s right, closer to the ladderlike shelves than he was, but neither they nor he could get out of the room without moving out into the open and risking execution.

As Kane tried to track all the enemies in his mind’s eye, his Commtact burst to life once more. It was Grant.

“Not that I’m complaining,” Grant said, “but we’re outnumbered here, partner.”

“I noticed,” Kane sourly acknowledged. “Looks like they had reinforcements tucked away.”

“These see-through cabinets are no cover at all,” Brigid added over the hidden Commtact unit.

“What are you suggesting?” Kane asked, his eyes fixed on the sentry who had grabbed Brigid. The man was busy reloading his Calico subgun. Kane saw now that the sentry had entered via a smaller chamber set to the rear of the trophy room. They had to have walked straight past the inset door when they had originally entered the complex.

“A bloodbath might not be our best avenue of attack,” Brigid mused.

“Ever the diplomat, Baptiste,” Kane growled in response, but under the circumstances he tended to agree.

Though Kane had absorbed Brigid’s words, his mind was focused on the guard by the cabinet containing the stone wing. The man had already shown himself to be dangerous, with a quick temper and an itchy trigger finger. What’s more, he was deadly fast—a lethal combination to face in any armed man. Worse yet, Kane thought as he peered at the spent shells at his feet, the lunatic was using wadcutters, nasty, flat-nosed rounds that did more and bloodier damage than a standard bullet. Any of Kane’s crew hit by one of those, even a glancing blow, would likely be incapacitated if not outright killed. The carved throne at Kane’s back had great rents across its upright section now, and thick wooden splinters carpeted the floor around the busted display case where the wadcutters had torn the arcane piece of furniture apart. With fortune on his side, a man could take a bullet and remain standing; wadcutters just ripped apart anything they made contact with, and could easily go straight through the shadow suits the Cerberus team wore.

Kane turned his mind back to the conversation of strategy. “I’m gonna go make friends,” he stated over the Commtact.

HIS SUBGUN RELOADED, the guard with the wadcutter bullets inched around the cabinet, the light glinting from his shattered goggle lens. Holding it solidly by its twin-handled grip, the man poked the Calico’s long muzzle in Kane’s direction, his cheek burning from the bullet his goggles had deflected.

RELUCTANTLY, KANE sent the Sin Eater back to its hiding place in his wrist sheath and stood to his full height, hands held in the air above him. “Salutations, millennial guys. Wonder if we can—” he began.

The itchy-triggered guard in the furs didn’t wait for the rest. His finger pressed down on the firing stud of the Calico, blasting a round of wadcutters across the brightly lit room. Kane dived for cover as the formidable stream of hot lead cut through the air toward him.

Across from Kane, Grant located the assailant, placed the firing millennialist in his sights and returned fire, bullets spitting from the nose of his Sin Eater. Lightning quick, the millennialist ducked back behind cabinet cover as a dozen high-density, 9 mm bullets raced at him. Grant’s leading bullet slammed through the front pane of the cabinet, shattering the glass and drilling into the worn stone wing that rested within. The bullet’s lethal siblings followed a split second after, peppering the mossy surface of that strange hunk of masonry.

Paris, France, September 3, 1928

ONLY THE KEENEST of eyes would have noticed, but then Abraham Flag did have the keenest of eyes. One of the grotesque gargoyles that was perched atop the medieval church was not quite as worn, as decayed and moss-covered, as its companions. It was a well-disguised replica, but Flag could tell instantly that it was newly crafted. So, where was the original that this imperfect impostor had replaced? And why had someone gone to so much trouble to cover up the switch? Flag’s formidable mind was immediately intrigued.

However, before Flag could even begin to process this information, a dark shadow loomed overhead and suddenly swooped down toward him. Flag dived for cover behind the nearest gravestone, and whatever had attacked flew back up into the gray sky, but not before Flag had glimpsed it.

Now Flag knew why there was a new stone gargoyle watching over the tower—because the old one was no longer made of stone. Gargoyles were meant to watch over, guard and protect their church from evil spirits and so this rogue had to be stopped, and fast. Professor Flag had been in many tricky, even dangerous, situations, but this was unlike any other he had encountered. It would take all his skill to put this right.

There was not much time to think, as the demonic creature dived at him again. This time Flag didn’t get out of the way, but instead stood his ground. His bravery seemed to confuse the gargoyle, and it pulled itself up short directly in front of Flag. They were now face to evil face. Flag’s mind was in motion, drawing quickly to the surface everything he knew about gargoyles and medieval beliefs.

Flag recalled a popular prayer from medieval times, for protection against evil. It was a prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel. Well, he certainly needed protection from evil now, and he had nothing to lose. Without ever taking his eyes off the hovering gargoyle, Flag began to recite:

“As smoke vanisheth, so let them vanish away: as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the Presence of God. Judge Thou, O’Lord, them that wrong me: overthrow them that fight against me.”

Instantly, in midflight, the live gargoyle turned back into stone and came crashing down to the ground. As Flag leaped out of the way of that falling chunk of lifeless masonry, his fierce eyes spotted a motionless figure watching from high up in the bell tower—a human figure. As their eyes met, Flag heard the flapping of leathery wings, felt the coldness of a shadow from overhead as another stone demon bore down upon him….

THE CACOPHONY of gunfire echoed all around the trophy-filled chamber as the millennialists traded shots with the Cerberus trio. Bullets zinged back and forth as the battle continued. The gargoyle’s wing that, moments ago, had sat safely behind glass for almost three hundred years toppled from its mounting and crashed to the floor as Grant’s bullets peppered it. The millennialist guard who had been using its cabinet for cover was already on his feet, hurrying across the room, to the next piece of available cover—a glass cabinet holding a signet ring with a crimson gemstone. The ruby twinkled as it caught the light of gunfire and explosions all around it.

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